Texas Primary: Message Success, Message Failure

The Texas GOP primary for governor is a lesson in both message success and message failure. Gov. Rick Perry was badly behind a year ago. Last night he won by 20 points. His rise began in the spring, driven in large part by his embrace of strong anti-Washington and pro-Texas rhetoric. While outsiders found many of his comments "secessionist" and extreme, Perry showed a fine ear for his Texas Republican voters who are themselves quite anti-Washington and pro-Texas. If the rhetoric was at times overblown, it still resonated with his constituency, and what harm is there in a little secessionist talk if it stirs up your base. You know you don't mean it literally, regardless of how MSNBC interprets it.

Sen. Hutchinson faced the problem of how to "out-populist" an overblown but effective populist. She was never going to be able to out-do Gov. Perry on this dimension. (See the lesson's of Gov. George Wallace in Alabama in the 1960s.) So her only option was to find an effective critique of that populism. She never did.

The challenge is how to find an effective counter argument to a rhetoric that cannot be taken literally but which resonates with voters as populist calls to arms. Gov. Perry expressed a symbolic truth for over half of GOP primary voters last night. Sen. Hutchinson failed to convince more that 30% of them that those symbolic claims were in fact irresponsible and unrealistic. She could not find a way to play the grown up to Perry's teenager.

This has long been a democratic (small d) problem. When populist enthusiasms run hot, be it Joe McCarthy or George Wallace or Rick Perry, responsible grownups find it very hard to compete. Wallace and Perry, at least, were consummate politicians with fine ears for voters. That is what makes them so effective as candidates and what poses so difficult a problem for their opponents.